Software Update 2.1: A Cure for What Ails the iPhone?

By  |  Friday, September 12, 2008 at 9:48 am

If you own an iPhone 3G, the most insanely great news at Tuesday’s Apple event might not have involved the new Nano or Touch or iTunes 8. Instead, you might have been most excited by the news that the iPhone 2.1 software update was imminent. Just rereading what Steve Jobs said (via Daring Fireball), I find my pulse is racing a bit:

“2.1 software update is a big update. It fixes lots of bugs. You’ll get fewer call drops. You will get significantly improved battery life, for most customers. We have fixed a lot of bugs where if you have a lot of apps on the phone, you’re not going to get some of the crashes and other things that we’ve seen. Backing up to iTunes is dramatically faster. And so just a lot of bugs have been fixed.”

As promised, the update is now available–if you’ve got an iPhone, plug it into and use iTunes to check for an update. Apple has caught a lot of flack lately for vague release notes on updates (“bug fixes”); it may have been listening to the gripes, since the list of fixes you see before installing 2.1 is long, specific, and nifty:

That encompasses most of the quirks I’ve encountered with my iPhone 3G, and I’ll be happy to have Genius playlists available right on the phone. And I figure that once Apple’s squashed the biggest bugs, it can devote most of its time to adding new stuff that the iPhone clearly needs, such as cut-and-paste and synching of iCal and Outlook to-do lists.

I’m downloading and installing 2.1 right now, and if I have anything to say about, I will. But I figure that if the update does its job, it’ll be kind of hard to review–I’ll just notice over time that my iPhone has stopped doing all the things that made up the hate half of the love-hate relationship I’ve had with it. (Actually, there’s one formal test I know I want to do–there’s a hotel lobby in downtown San Francisco where my iPhone drops every single call I make. If that problem goes away, I’ll consider iPhone software 2.1 a miracle cure.)

If you install the update, lemme know what you think…

 
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2 Comments For This Post

  1. Andres Lucero Says:

    Installed it yesterday and the SMS app seems much improved so far — faster launch times and no more lag while typing. That was the only outstanding issue my phone had, so as long as that bug stays squashed, I’m happy.

  2. asia Says:

    i love mac product. i tried it to my iphone and it work great even a little confused a first.

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